1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data analysis storage, retrieval and analysis, in general and to a method, apparatus and system for capturing and analyzing customer interactions including customer and business experience, intelligence and content, in particular.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Many organizations are involved in generating interactions with customers or other businesses. Many organizations capture or collect such interactions, storing potentially vast volumes media. Examples of such organizations are call centers across many industries, financial trading floors, intelligence surveillance systems, and public safety, emergency and law enforcement entities.
To a limited extent, people, through playback of recordings and listening to interactions, perceive and sometimes document the content of such media. Nevertheless, the details passed in voice and other forms of interactions are largely lost simply due to the size of interaction volume, and the vast majority is not put to use, even when captured. Businesses are looking at their interactions with customers and other businesses as a major source for information and insight about customers and business operations. Increasingly, businesses are striving to keep a closer touch with the customers and “listen” to what customers have to say, believing this will provide a competitive advantage in the market place.
The overwhelming amounts of information collected by organizations require a structured approach if proper management is to be achieved, with the processes to develop a finely-honed content “distillery”, and the right tools to qualify, tag, sort reveal the relevant data. One example where large amounts of information are collected is the field of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is a business strategy whose outcomes optimize profitability; revenue and customer satisfaction by organizing around customer segments, fostering customer-satisfying behaviors and implementing customer centric processes. CRM should enable greater customer insight, increased customer access, effective customer interactions, and integration throughout all customer channels and back-office enterprise functions.
A substantial portion of CRM is Analytical CRM or Business Analytics (customer and business intelligence). Customer and business intelligence is the use of various data mining, databases, data warehouse and data-mart technologies on customer information and transactional data to create a better understanding of the customer. Such understanding is used to leverage a company's efforts to retain, up-sell and cross-sell a specific customer. It is also a major cornerstone for personalization of content and segmentation of customers leading to improved one-to-one marketing efforts and overall performance. A major portion of the interaction between a modern business and its customers are conducted via the Call Center or Contact Center. Interactions with the business' customers and prospects take the form of telephone and additional media such as e-mail, web chat, collaborative browsing, shared whiteboards, Voice over IP (VoIP) and the like. The additional media captured by the Call Center has transformed the Call Center into a Contact Center captured not only traditional phone calls, but also multimedia contacts.
The ability to capture digitized voice, screen and data is now available in Call Centers and Contact Centers. Such capturing abilities are typically used for compliance purposes, when such recording of the interactions is required by law or other means of regulation, risk management, limiting the businesses' legal exposure due to false allegations regarding the content of the interaction, or for quality assurance, using the re-creation of the interaction to evaluate an agent's performance. Other businesses areas where capturing digital data is becoming increasingly important are: betting and gambling, entertainment, dealing for personal accounts, frauds and money laundering, alternative dispute resolution, mobile telephones, tapping, front-running and the like. It should be emphasized that the call centers and the financial trading arenas are two distinct vertical markets.
Known analytical CRM focuses its analysis on the transactional data created by transaction processing systems such as the CRM platform or the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Such analysis is not performed on the content of the interaction with the customer. Simply put, such systems fail to make use of all the information exchanged during the interaction. One example is a direct insurance service and a phone inquiry. Through advertisement, customers contact the insurance service business. Due to legal requirements the insurance service sends the insurance forms to the customer and have the customer sign them and mail them back to close the deal. Often customers call back to clarify contract details. When customers are handled, the type of call is classified and categorized in the data system, such as CRM and the like. Such call is categorized into one of a set of predefined criteria and a transactional piece of data is created. Such piece of data can include date and time, customer name or ID, agent name or ID, insurance policy number, other call related data such as duration, direction, and the call classification from a list of predefined categories. The call classification could be for example “contract clarification” or “contract inquiry”. In some cases the agent might add to the transactional data some free-form text that might or might not indicate the specific clause that the customer asked about. Current analytical solutions analyze transactional data, and as such would not yield information regarding the cause of inquiries regarding the contract. This means that while the system is recording such calls it is not using the information stored in connection with the call, which also includes the call content and the CRM record or screen event. Requesting the agents to provide deeper and more thorough “observations” of the interaction and its contents would interfere with their main task of responding to customer queries thus reducing their capability to handle calls and increasing the call centers' cost per call. In addition, the unpredictable nature of providing observations calls for improved judgmental skills, which incur sustained training and level adjustment costs. Screen events are the events identified by a system in response to one or more of the following: actions performed by the agent in association with the use of a system as viewed by the agent on the screen display including but not limited to keyboard press, mouse click, etc.; data entered into all or part (Region Of Interest) of the display or non-displayed window (window might not be in focus); operating system screen related events. Such as the Esc button pressed, etc; pre-defined multi-sequence events. Such as entering the amount in window application A can generate an update in certain reduction field in Application B. Only these dependant occurrences would yield either input or trigger for the analysis process.
In addition, current systems do not provide for analyzing interactions and at the same time analyze associated data or other interactions. Thus, for example, interactions made and recorded by traders who trade on financial floors are not fully analyzed. Similarly, interactions recorded by call center and contact center agents are not fully analyzed. Information received and logged is not fully understood because parts of such information is not processed and associated with actions of the agents. The result is a deficiency in exploitation of information and data recorded. The person skilled in the art will appreciate that there is therefore a need for a new and novel method and system for capturing and analyzing content.